This is an interesting venture for GrabOne, and I am sure they will have big things coming soon as they line up 1-Day fair and square in their sights. If you missed it already, 1-DayOut closed shop a few weeks back, so they can concentrate on what they do best (being physical products).

The daily deal and group buying markets are a very crowded space in NZ at the moment with some big international players landing in the market recently (think Groupon and LivingSocial), however GrabOne internal stat’s show that they are far exceeding the sales of any of their nearest competitors by a massive margin, and I don’t see this letting up anytime soon, and they have the fan base on Twitter and Facebook well covered.

I think the next 6-12 months will be a make it or break it for some of the smaller sites out there, and I expect to see a lot of the smaller sites dropping off the radar.

So why not use a groupon.co.nz domain name? Those Leibovich brothers (who are cyber squatters) I mentioned earlier in the year still have their mitts on on the .co.nz domain. Read more about that here if you are interested (they accepted then rejected a $286,000 offer from Groupon for the domain!). They have launched under the name StarDeals in Australia, but of course that name here is used by FlyBuys for an annual promotion they run.

They are currently looking for sales consultants to scout out some deals for them – if you are thinking about applying for a job then there is some interesting information on their US site about how not to get hired at Groupon – and these are probably pretty valid things to note if applying for any job!

So, watch this space, and we will let you know when they go live. I am sure they will have some pretty good launch deals as well, esp with the very deep and big pockets of their US parent.

TreatMe launched their group buying deals today (22nd March) with $1 burgers from BurgerFuel in Auckland and $1 bagels from Wholly Bagels in Wellington, however it didn’t go off without a hitch, with loads of people (including myself) constantly getting errors when trying to make a purchase. It appears their magical elves in the background kept slipping up:

TreatMe.co.nz Server 500 slip up

After having a big build up in the social media space prior to launch, they started getting a lot of feedback on Twitter and Facebook – remembering this is all happening at between 11pm and 1am, when most sane people are snugly tucked up in bed sleeping and not thinking about what’s for lunch or dinner tomorrow.

There was a similar response on their Facebook page, with lots of unhappy customers. Their fan base grew from around 500 fans prior to midnight to over 1500 by the morning – although some full page advertising would have helped them along.

There were some successes however in the first hour, in fact by 1am over 3000 burgers had been purchased already, and a little after 8am, they sold out of all 20,000 burgers. TreatMe seem to be getting into the social space quite well, with their Twitter and Facebook activity quite high during the launch – lets hope they keep that up, and lets hope they address some of the negative feedback they received during the launch, rather than constant bragging and re-tweeting their successes. They pretty much stopped responding to the bad, and only commented on the good – not a bad thing, but they annoyed a lot of people last night (including myself!)

I am happy to report however that after well over 20 attempts to purchase (I have now memorised my credit card details!) I successfully purchased a burger for myself and another as a gift, and was a huge sigh of relief to see this finally appear:

That’s right, after launching into the daily deal space last year with their one day sales, TradeMe are now launching into the group buying space with the upcoming launch of TreatMe on March 22nd 2011. The will be initially launching in the Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch areas, and hopefully will quickly expand to other regions.

So what does this mean for the group buying space? Only time will tell really. GrabOne seem to have the market pretty well covered locally.. Australian giant Cudo is preparing for a launch in NZ soon, with TV advertising now taking place. Spreets and Groupy are still going strong. The worlds largest (and first) group buying/coupon site is Groupon, and they are currently preparing for a launch in Australia – will they also expand to NZ? Again, only time will tell. The market does seem to be getting quite saturated however, and there is only so much consumers can handle before anything else just becomes noise in the background.

Regardless on the amount of group buying sites, TreatMe appears to be launching with a deal from Burger Fuel, and if you sign up now you can be in the draw to win one of three iPhones, so at the least you might get a good burger for cheap, and who can complain about that!

That’s right, Half Day Sale have relaunched/rebranded, and are now called LastDrinks.co.nz.

Every week day and weekend they have some great prices on wine at heavily reduced prices. Run by the same friendly folk who run WineSale.co.nz (New Zealand’s most successful internet wine company), you will find wine and liquor at prices on their site that you will not find anywhere else in New Zealand. Delivery is charged at a flat fee per case, aiming to get your wine to you within three days of your order. All wine is dispatched by Lastdrinks.co.nz through their customer service centre in Wellington – so you will not find yourself dealing with any anonymous third party.